If your brilliant growth idea is to force customers to opt out, you will succeed, permanently.

Organizations with broken systems are also learning another important lesson -- whether they have outposts in social networks or not, customers will take their issues online.

How long are you willing to go down the reactive route?

Fair vs. special in social

Because issues get amplified quickly online, many businesses are finding themselves in a vise -- impact of presences in social networks depends on overall customer experience. Social outposts are a double-edged sword, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

It sends the message that when all else fails, complaining publicly will get to a resolution, and it usually does. And because from experience all else has by and large failed for many with so many organization published customer service channels, people who can now skip those entirely.

Life is not fair, we all agree on that. However, the root cause of special vs. fair treatment online comes from deep organizational disconnects. Unless your business plans to use what it learns online as an opportunity to fix internal processes, social outposts will continue to be expensive lightning rods.

Expensive on two fronts:

special customer treatment due to least effort and cost for customers to get their issue resolved, which is not sustainable for the business

bad influence on the rest of the people watching what is happening, which is the worst kind of advertising you don't buy

What can you do to bridge the disconnect?

Make every customer special

By fixing your internal systems and processes so that treatment is fair for all. People respect fairness when they experience it. It's a good business practice to look at the unintended consequences of short term decisions on the long term viability of your organization.

A solid reputation as a fair business gives you a good baseline to do more interesting things online. It buys you interest where there would be skepticism, or worse, a cynical outlook. It also positions your organization to benefit the most from social interactions.

Fairness builds credibility, the main ingredient in trust. The consistency of fair gives you a license to impress proactively. On the inside, fair frees you from the constant hair on fire situations, so you can invest that energy back into growing the business.

However, fair doesn't mean ignoring issues or covering up for them. Retaliating for negative reviews is not the way to go in the same way that rewarding only the digital squeaky wheels will set a precedent -- your lawyers agree on this one, too (go ahead, ask them).

The whole Web is a big customer conversation. Earn attention by using your outposts to grow commerce, to transform the tansactional nature of buying into repeat business. It's a preferable option to fighting to keep those transactions you've had with buyers from turning sour.

What is your behavior teaching customers? What can you do to make a difference today?

Comments

Great post, and it's a topic that organizations are going to have to take a long, hard look at. I wrote a series of posts last week about a bad experience I had with Domino's Pizza, and how I was ignored on their Twitter account until I actually blogged about it. Not fair to most customers either, is it? But when their process led to them opening up a customer service ticket (their typical process, so far so good) that ticket was ignored and I didn't receive a resolution through that channel. It wasn't until I blogged again that the corporate office did anything. So I think they were on to a good idea...route Twitter inquiries into the standard process...but then, as you say, that process can't be broken. People will otherwise feel ignored and will get louder.

@Valeria - so much of bank discussion is ruled by attorneys -- the legal situation seems to dictate the response. Yet, the risk of poor interaction seems to get short shrift. This is an opportunity for communicators in dealing with legal: establish a risk profile for responses -- communicate what the potential risks are for each action, and quantify them based on your experience. Engaging with customers is far less risky than it seems on the surface (every lawyer will offer the alternative of doing/saying nothing) -- especially when we have cases of where lack of engagement (United Breaks Guitars, financial crisis, etc.) leads to brand damage at least and financial impact in other cases.

@Gabriele -- it is in the business best interest to connect the dots between channels once it sees it has a problem. The need to train a separate teams comes from having outsourced the first one in many cases...

@Judy -- oh my, a Wikipedia entry documenting a poor business practice... making people feel "harassed, deceived, intimidated, and threatened" discourages long term relationships... and how many new customers does a company need to make up for those who leave? Regarding the luggage check in conversation, I've had bags ripped and cracked, and items missing on more than one trip. Gee, I wonder why people don't trust airlines with their valuable items when they are forced to send them through? There should be the name of the bag handler on your security tag; let's make the whole thing transparent, let's hold people accountable when they don't do so themselves.